


Quadroon/Shasa

by foxriverinmate



Category: Prison Break
Genre: M/M, Mentions of Rape, mentions of m/m sex but nothing explicit, physical violence, possible incest, totally au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-26
Updated: 2010-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:25:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxriverinmate/pseuds/foxriverinmate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In turbulent times one man's admiration, and later love, for a slave leads him to find happiness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quadroon/Shasa

**Author's Note:**

> Written because I started to think about WM's heritage and wondered what life could have been like for someone in his situation as slavery was coming to an end in the American South. This bunny, once it had me pinned to the wall, would not let me go. I have deliberately not named the narrator of the first part of the story because it works for several characters and you can decide who you'd like it to be.

QUADROON

 

I am not his master.

Only He who created such an exquisite creature could hope to claim ownership.

There are small tell-tail clues to his heritage; the soft curl of his hair and the subtle light brown of his skin. But this man could have passed as a free man if he had so desired.

Of course he wouldn't or didn't; the man I've always known him to be would never betray his forebears.

As I sit watching him, pleasantly exhausted after our incredible love-making, his golden skin standing out against the pure white linen of my bed in the first rosy glow of dawn, he is sleeping contentedly, his face turned away from the window.

Even in the soft light I can see the scars of the wounds I, however reluctantly, inflicted on the perfect canvas of his back and sorrow and shame, as it ever does, fill my heart…

 

~*~*~

 

 _**"Be sure you don't spare the effort, boy, or Bradley will take the whip and it will be forty lashes, not twenty."** _

Horrified I look at Michael, stripped to the waist and tied to the frame. To make matters worse I know he didn't do it. His mother, Katie, confessed to me that it was she who knocked over the milk churn, spilling the liquid all over the cold room floor.

Michael, ever the protector of those he loves, went to my father and confessed to the crime, thus earning himself twenty lashes as punishment to spare his mother.

I had hated my father all my life for the iron grip with which he ran the plantation and the family. His coldness and strictness even extended towards my mother who took her own life when I was still a child because she could no long bear to be married to such a bitter man. And I have good reason to suspect it was he who raped Katie when she was just fifteen years old, just as her own mother had been impregnated by a white man, and sired the beautiful slave who waited stoically for me to administer his punishment.

I knew I had to make it look convincing or have Bradley Bellick, the overseer, flay the flesh from Michael's back, but I had never been asked to do something so terrible in all my twenty seven years.

My father treated me like I, too, was a slave he had bought and he was permanently angry with me for refusing to take a wife. Four years into the future would see his stony heart give out on the day he dropped down dead in the parlour.

The Lord damn me for it but I could no more grieve for the man who had sired me than walk on water.

Uttering a silent prayer that I could make the flogging look convincing without hurting the seventeen-year-old slave too badly I drew back the whip and almost faltered as it cracked against his back. I know it had to hurt but he barely flinched.

Lash after lash criss-crossed the smooth coffee-coloured flesh, each one making me want to scream in sympathetic agony and moral outrage and it was not until I began to draw blood after six lashes that I could see Michael's body trembling as the pain started to bite savagely.

It seemed to go on for an eternity with my father calling each numbered lash and only the thought that Bellick was waiting to take over should I falter made me grit my teeth and finish poor Michael's punishment.

It was done. Blood had been spilled and I sensed rather than saw my father and Bellick turn away, no doubt wearing satisfied smirks on their faces, as I stood with my head bowed, the whip lying forgotten on the ground. I could vaguely hear Katie's soft sobs to my left. I looked up.

"Help me, Katie," I commanded, horror and self-disgust at what I had done roughening my voice.

Michael's mother and I, aided by another teenaged slave, Fernando, cut Michael down, Fernando and Katie catching him before he fell to the ground in a faint.

Between us Fernando and I carried Michael back to the tiny cottage behind the house that he shared with his mother and laid him gently, face down, on the rough cot in the corner of the only room.

As Katie went to fetch water and a rag I leaned over Michael and put my mouth close to his ear. "I'm so sorry, Michael," I muttered. "So sorry."

With a grimace of pain he turned his head to look into my eyes. "I forgive you, young master. Better for you to administer punishment than Bellick"

Young master. I almost smiled at the irony in that title. I remember many times thinking this man, this youth, had no master. My father might have owned his soul, since the children of slaves took on the status of their mothers, but with Michael, even when he was just a child, it seemed as if it was through his eyes that God looked into the heart of a man to discern if he was good or bad.

I hope, when Michael looked at me that way, he could see I was not like my father at all.

 

~*~*~

 

I smile as Michael moves a little restlessly in his sleep but doesn't awaken.

I oft times reflect on all that I owe this ex-slave. Were it not for him the Union soldiers might have laid waste to the plantation when they cut a swathe through the Deep South freeing slaves but Michael, who had learned his letters and numbers from me and had gone on to prove he was naturally gifted, though it was something both he and I kept hidden from my father, had kept the fields planted and the cotton harvested and the bills paid, while I was away fighting a war I had no heart for, and when a group of Union soldiers passed through he convinced them that he was a freed slave like the few who had stayed behind out of loyalty to me, and they had been left alone to continue tending the fields and feeding themselves until my return.

Thereafter they were free to go if they chose but every one of them remained. Many freed slaves found it hard to make new lives once they were given their freedom and those that had remained all through the war worked for a fair wage with all their needs catered for. Why, then, would they want to cast themselves adrift in an uncertain world on the road to an indeterminate future?

 

~*~*~

 

 _**Michael had been twenty four when he had finally come to lie with me one night.** _

I had been shocked to discover that the reason I had no desire to take a wife lay in my love for him. Until that night I had loved him almost as a brother, which he may well have been were it not for his mother's mulatto status, but as he climbed into my bed without a word and I welcomed him into my arms I realised it was so much more than respect and admiration that made my heart beat a little faster whenever he was near.

Strangely he, in his instinctual way, had realised long before I did.

Thereafter he came to lie with me when he could and our spiritual love manifested into a physical one and after so many years of desolate loneliness I had finally found my soul-mate.

 

~*~*~

 

Smiling fondly, I stand and walk over to the bed, looking down on the saint-like creature sleeping there. Leaning over him my hand strokes lovingly over his scarred back as my lips softly kiss the line of raised flesh over his shoulder. Thanking the Lord for creating this man, something I seem to do every day, I settle myself beside him, my arm wrapping around his waist and drawing him closer.

Sighing, he snuggles backwards so we're spooned against each other, his hand entwining in mine as he drifts down into contented slumber once more.

Dawn had come but rising could wait. Every moment I spent nestled close to Michael was like a small slice of Heaven right here on Earth.

 

 

SHASA

 

He thinks he is not my master.

He's wrong though because he owns my heart.

Since my childhood I had called him Shasa, which my mother told me was a word her father had taught her. It came across the ocean with the souls wrenched cruelly from their home in Africa and it meant _precious water_. He was precious to me then and is so now; he is the very sustenance upon which my life depends.

He asked me once why I stayed on the plantation while he was away fighting a war he did not believe in. He told me I could have left and passed as a free man. But how could I leave while he was caught up in the war and I feared I would never see him again? And if I had left what would have become of my mother, Fernando and the other slaves? Shunning my heritage was something I could not contemplate; any more than I could consider leaving while he risked his life in distant battlefields.

I know he watches me as I sleep. There are times when I'm feigning slumber and I see him through half-lidded eyes and I see the love in his.

I see, too, the guilt for what his father made him do to me. I want to take his shame and sorrow and crush them underfoot because had he not obeyed his father's orders that day so long ago it would have been so much worse.

I forgave him as soon as I felt the bite of the first lash and I hope one day he will believe me.

His father. Was he my father too? Mother would never tell me who sired me but I have my suspicions.

He was told not to spare any effort that day, or Bradley, the overseer, would take over and it would mean double the lashes.

He knows I did not spill that milk in the cold room because for some reason I can never lie to him. But the alternative of having to watch my mother punished in some way was too awful to bear so I took her punishment instead.

 **_The rope binding my wrists cuts into my flesh as I await my punishment. I can hear mother weeping quietly as every slave on the plantation stands in a line to witness what could happen if they transgress, just as it's always been with Shasa's father._ **

Even my mother falls silent, stifling her weeping, as the first lash stings my back but I grit my teeth and try not to flinch. Thereafter, each time the whip curls around my body, the pain grows worse and as I feel blood trickle down my back I cannot keep from trembling with the pain.

When it is finally over I'm vaguely aware of my mother's tearful voice as Shasa and my friend Fernando bear me away to our tiny cottage behind the house.

I try not to whimper as they lay me gently on my narrow cot. Though the pain somehow recedes when I hear Shasa's apology whispered into my ear.

I forgive him. How could I not? In a strange way he did what he had to do out of a sense of compassion. Had he not my punishment would have been left to Bellick, a vicious man who took pleasure in administering punishments ordered by the man who thought himself my master. Better to be whipped with a compassionate hand than by a whip in the hands of a sadist.

And whenever I looked into Shasa's eyes all I ever saw was kindness…and, I hoped, love.

 

~*~*~

 

Four years later Shasa's father dropped down dead in the parlour. Given his cold heart there seemed to be a strange kind of justice in the manner of his demise.

I saw the relief in Shasa's eyes for I knew it had never been just the slaves who had suffered. His father had been a cold man towards his wife and had little time for his son either; even more so when Shasa reached his mid-twenties and showed no sign of marrying.

Thereafter he took over the running of the plantation with a light hand. His first action was to be rid of Bellick and install another of the white workers as overseer. Charles Westmoreland was a lot older than his predecessor and while he still worked us hard he was a fair man.

When the war broke out and Shasa was expected to join the Confederates, however reluctantly, Charles, knowing he could never keep the plantation running alone, asked me to help since I had learned my letters and numbers from Shasa when I was a child.

The war was a difficult time and when the Confederate army were forced to retreat Union soldiers billeted themselves in the big house. They were rough but not unkind and we convinced them that we were freed slaves, which Charles had the sense to confirm, and we were left in peace.

My heart sang with joy when Shasa returned. Nightmares in which he was killed or maimed had haunted me every night while he was gone but his return, whole and uninjured, was a day of celebration for everyone.

Some nights later he talked to me about the future for me and all the slaves who were now free men and women. He told me he had seen something of what became of the slaves who had fled their former masters and their lives were harsh and their futures tenuous. He confided that he hoped all of us would stay and work for a fair wage where we would have a roof over our heads and food in our bellies but he could not force any of us to remain if we were set on leaving. He asked me if I would talk to all of the remaining ex-slaves and tell them there would be a home and work here for them for as long as he lived and breathed.

Shasa did not say it but his voice held a note of pleading when he asked me if I would stay.

Why would I ever want to leave him?

 

~*~*~

 

Everyone stayed, including Charles Westmoreland. We had a life there, family; and I had Shasa.

I was twenty four before I summoned the courage to lie with him one night.

Afterward he told me he had finally realised why he had never taken a wife. His love for me had made all other unions unsatisfactory. He told me he feels when I look at him it's as if God is looking into his soul, judging him. It's a fanciful notion and I make no claims to being anything other than a humble ex-slave. I feel he has placed me unnecessarily on a pedestal.

All I know is when, in the pale light of a new dawn, I feel his hand stroke lovingly over the scars on my back, scars he had been forced to inflict, I feel content.

Half-awake I feel him draw me closer and with a blissful sigh I snuggle back against him and our hands entwine.

Sleep, in the arms of the man who may or may not be my brother, comes easily.


End file.
